The Gifted: Salvation from Beyond
by Rhaza3517
Summary: The events of 7/15 left the Mutant Underground and mutants worldwide in disarray. Other mutants who sought to exploit this chaos began their power plays, while pockets of humanity sunk into repressed bigotry and prepared for war. All the while, cosmic eyes loomed over it all and narrowed in response. This would not stand; a champion would be sent, one to fix things HIS way...


Rao: the Primordial Elder Deity of Krypton, the cosmic manifestation of Krypton's red sun, and the Kryptonian's celestial patron. Cythonna: the legendary Primordial Elder Goddess of Ice, Darkness, and the Void, powerful beyond reckoning, and one that not even Rao himself could completely banish from the universe. The first time they fought, the battles between Rao and Cythonna came to be called the Wars of Ice and Fire. Eons later, Cythonna escaped from the hidden prison Rao placed her in, and sought vengeance upon the only shred of his legacy that she could still sense in the universe, what with Krypton itself destroyed long ago: the Last Son of Krypton, Kal-El, known to humanity as Superman. Even though Cythonna easily overwhelmed the Man of Steel upon their first meeting, and he himself was fearful of being unable to defeat her, Rao's legacy summoned up his courage, executed a daring plan with the surprising aid of Lex Luthor, his arch-enemy for so many years, and against all odds, succeeded in confining Cythonna within the confines of Earth's yellow sun, Rao's link to his legacy and the near-inexhaustible source of power great enough to empower Kal-El to victory over the ice goddess.

With the ice goddess confined once more within the very symbol of Rao's might, Kal-El sadly left Cythonna to her fate, even after offering to save her from being trapped once again if she foreswore her vengeance against Krypton for all time. Cythonna, of course refused, and Kal-El departed back to Earth, slightly disheartened that yet another piece of his history was lost to him due to arrogance and hate. However, the son of Jor-El had no way of knowing that his eternal patron had indeed been watching over him during the battle, and had chosen to act upon the one thing that he knew Cythonna wanted far more than even vengeance upon him: children. Per her station, Cythonna could only birth wild monsters with no conscience, and had sought Rao in the past to add his immense power to that same offspring. Rao's light did not fail him in seeing Cythonna's true wish, and rejected her, thus beginning the Wars of Ice and Fire in the first place. Now, though, the elder deity could see something had profoundly changed in the ice goddess as she languished deep within her solar prison. She no longer wished to have those same offspring to promote herself in the universe; she truly now wanted to be the very thing any child wished from their sires: to have a mother and a father, so that they could have a family.

Rao could see that change beginning to occur in Cythonna, and although he knew he could not bring back any semblance of the Kryptonian race due to his own foolish actions in their passing from the universe, he also knew that between them, they could bring to life a new version of such progeny, blessed in their existence and strong in their conviction to do the most good with the gifts bestowed upon them by their parents. With that in mind, Rao prepared himself for the first true correspondence between him and Cythonna in millennia that did not begin with a titanic energy blast capable of destroying planets, or with a quantum singularity powerful enough to rupture the time-space continuum...

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Little did either of them know, that after their meeting, cosmic forces benevolent yet unaligned to good or evil would move forward, carefully sifting through the vast lingering amounts of energy, essence, and sheer power exuded by the two deities during their past conflicts, and collect enough of those precious aspects to craft a fail-safe contingency in the case that something, somewhere, in a far off universe, went so far off course that only one with the immense power and abilities born from their patrons would be the only thing that could save them all from utter destruction and complete extinction...


End file.
